1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the reconciliation and balancing of cash register cash drawers or tills. More particularly, the invention relates to a revenue balancing method and computer program that more quickly, accurately, and easily reconciles or balances revenue contained in a first cash drawer while at the same time building or filling a second cash drawer.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Grocery stores and other retail and wholesale establishments that use cash registers to ring up sales must regularly reconcile or balance cashiers' cash drawers at the end of shifts to ensure that the money in the cash drawers matches sales figures for the cash registers. Cash drawers must also be “rebuilt” or constructed in preparation for another cashier coming on shift.
Most stores typically balance and construct cash drawers with back office accounting personnel who manually remove and count the money from cash drawers after a cashier's shift has ended and manually count and add money to new cash drawers. Those skilled in the art will appreciate that such manual methods of balancing and constructing cash drawers are very time consuming and often lead to miscounting errors. For large stores that regularly balance and construct many cash drawers every day, the costs associated with such cash drawer balancing and construction can be substantial.
Systems and methods that automate some aspects of cash drawer balancing and construction have been developed. However, these systems and methods still require accounting personnel to manually perform many of the steps required to balance and build cash drawers and therefore are still time consuming and prone to miscounting errors.
Another problem with prior art systems and methods of cash drawer balancing and reconciliation is the need to repeatedly perform pick-ups (the removal of excess cash from cash drawers for security reasons), loans (the addition of extra cash into cash drawers for change-making purposes), and/or the purchase of additional change by cashiers. Pick-ups, loans, and change purchasing typically involve several employees and therefore use a considerable amount of labor, especially for large stores.